Friday, July 11, 2014

How sorting gets ruined.

Frequent readers - or close followers - of this blog will know, that the share feature (SEND intent) is one of my favourite features on Android.

To recap: it allows any application to share content via (or send content to) any other application, e.g. email, facebook, google+, sms/text, bluetooth, ... You name it.
All that needs to be done is for the target app to register itself for handling certain content types, and then it can be picked by the user, whenever a suitable content type needs to be sent. Android will automatically generate the list of all apps that are available for this content.

So far, so god.

Now in order to be at the top of that list, most apps "fake" and "A" into this name. But this is getting out of hand.

Let me draw your attention to exhibit A:

Exhibit A - the share menu

So this makes the alphabetical sorting totally pointless.
This has to stop.

Next app will probably register itself with an underscore....

Reminds me of my times at Sun Microsystems not too long ago. Obviously a lot of things started with S there ... Sun, Solaris, SPARC, ... but then they created lines of business called Server, Storage, Software, Services.... So even when you sorted a list alphabetically, 90% would cluster under S...